Masterminds (37 page)

Andre closed the computer, then packed it in a carry-all. She had to clear her office. She had an escape plan, and it looked like she would need it.

She supposed she could bluff it out here, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.

After all, there wasn’t anything this DeRicci could do, even if she caught half the clones on the Moon. In a few hours, the last attack on the Moon would devastate all the domes, and take everyone’s attention away from the so-called masterminds, and place it on rebuilding, recovery, or perhaps, on deciding whether or not the Alliance was even necessary.

Andre had time to escape. If she did it right, no one would ever find her.

The only way to do it right was to remain calm.

Sure, they had captured a clone named Ostaka. He was a mid-level manager of the attacks, but he didn’t know everything. He knew some things that would set the so-called good guys on her trail, but even that might not have been enough.

And it sounded like he had done the important work.

Andre had believed for months now that if the Security Office on the Moon were neutralized, the attack would work.

She simply hadn’t believed it possible to completely neutralize that office.

It seemed like this clone had managed the impossible.

Her luck was holding.

But luck, as she had learned, favored the prepared.

The final mission was underway.

FIFTY-FIVE

GOMEZ HAD FINALLY
won the trust of poor Pippa Landau. The woman sat at the edge of her chair, looking terrified and out of place, even in her own body. She had confessed that she had cut her hair and wore different makeup than she had on Earth, and that she wasn’t wearing her usual clothing.

But she hadn’t completely recovered the persona she had lost when she Disappeared decades ago. She was rubbing her hands on her knees, and when she reached up to adjust the hair that no longer fell to her chin, the sweat stains from her palms dotted the fabric of her pants.

Gomez felt for her. Landau—or Takara Hamasaki, as she had once been known—was doing something she had vowed she never would, something that could possibly get her killed even now.

Gomez respected the amount of courage it had taken Landau/Hamasaki to leave her comfortable home on Earth and travel to the Moon, simply to impart information that might or might not help in the investigation of Anniversary Day.

Gomez still hadn’t gotten enough information from Landau to know if that decades-old experience would provide anything valuable or not.

Then the door to the room banged open. A tiny woman with close-cropped black hair burst inside.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The links aren’t working. Rudra Popova sent me for Marshal Gomez. She says that the chief is in trouble in her office and needs your help right away.”

Landau gasped audibly, but Gomez didn’t have time for her. Gomez stood, reaching for her laser pistol at the same time. Her hand closed on air. She had forgotten that she had left the pistol on the
Green Dragon,
figuring it would be easier to get into the security office without it.

“Stay here,” she said to Landau. “Someone will come for you.”

Gomez had no idea if that was true. As she followed the tiny woman out the door, she said to the woman, “Get some guards up here. We’re going to need to protect the people on this floor. Make sure one of those guards is in front of this door.”

“I don’t work here,” the woman said plaintively, “and I haven’t seen any guards since I arrived.”

Gomez cursed and pushed past her, Landau nearly forgotten. Gomez ran to DeRicci’s office, pulled back the door—

And saw no one.

She stepped deeper inside, moving stealthily, and then DeRicci popped up from behind that mound of trash.

DeRicci’s blouse and pants were soaked in blood, and some of it had sprayed across her face. She grinned at Gomez, eyes glittering happily.

“Hey, Marshal,” she said. “Welcome to the party.”

Gomez stepped around one of the desks and saw a man splayed on the floor. He had been in the conference room earlier, although he looked nothing like the rumpled but comfortable person who had been behind that desk.

Gomez recognized him by his thinning hair and, of all things, his government-issue shoes.

Dried blood covered his mouth and chin. His nose was swollen and his eyes were turning black-and-blue. Someone—DeRicci, probably—had broken his nose.

DeRicci had two laser pistols on her hip. A movement toward the back of the room revealed Popova, looking like a lost child. She was clutching two more laser pistols as if they might bite her, and there was a third on a desk near her. One of her hands clutched at least four laser cuffs.

“What did I miss?” Gomez asked. She felt a brush of air touch her back and turned just enough to see the woman who had fetched her.

“This idiot just pulled a laser pistol on me,” DeRicci said. “He seemed to think he could hold me in place. Either he forgot that I was a cop or he thought I was too out of practice to take him. He learned.”

Gomez grinned. She stepped deeper into the office, saw an open cabinet near one of the windows, with more weapons inside.

She turned to the woman who had fetched her. “I think we’re going to need some privacy here.”

“No, you’re not,” the woman said tightly. “You need me. You all need me and my partner. This guy is just one of the your problems. There are hundreds of others.”

“What’s she talking about?” DeRicci asked Popova.

“Clones,” Popova said. “More clones. My guess is this guy just initiated the third attack, and we don’t even know what it is.”

FIFTY-SIX

IT ONLY TOOK
the dispatch a moment to patch in the chief inspector for Armstrong’s dome. Ó Brádaigh had always hated Gary Lombrozo. The man had made Ó Brádaigh’s life a living hell on more than one occasion. Lombrozo was fussy, precise, and unimaginative. He hated change of all kinds.

Ó Brádaigh wiped his sweating palms together, then glanced at the officers assigned to guard him. The female officer was looking around the substructure as if she had never been here before, studying the sturdy beams and the lighting. The male officer watched Ó Brádaigh as if still expecting him to do something wrong.

“What do you want?” Lombrozo said, his nasal voice echoing. It almost sounded as if he were standing inside the substructure, instead of his life-sized face floating at eye-level.

“I have credible evidence that someone is going to tamper with the dome,” Ó Brádaigh said. “We’re going to need to an emergency surface sweep, and then your people are going to have to inspect the entire dome. Someone tampered with the sectioning, so that it wouldn’t come down even if there’s a breach, and—”

“You don’t give my department orders, Ó Brádaigh,” Lombrozo said.

This was why someone else needed to be in control of what was going on. Ó Brádaigh wasn’t good with people, he really wasn’t. And his relationship with Lombrozo was terrible at best.

“Look,” Ó Brádaigh said. “It was Armstrong PD that contacted you, right? They know how important this is—”

“Based on your lousy word? Ó Brádaigh, you’re the worst engineer in the city, and I have no idea why they keep you on, but whatever you think is an emergency, isn’t.”

The female officer now stared at the floating image of the chief inspector. She stepped closer, so that she was in his line of vision.

“Forgive me, sir,” she said to him. “I’m Armstrong Police Officer Karen Kobani. The Armstrong Police Department believes we have a credible threat here, and that all action must be taken immediately.”

Ó Brádaigh could have kissed her. The male officer beside her nodded.

Lombrozo turned his head slightly as he looked at the scene in that substructure. “Men like Ó Brádaigh can’t tell me how to do my job, Officer. Just because he says we need an emergency surface sweep doesn’t mean we do. Do you know what’ll happen in the city if we do something like that unscheduled?”

“Sir,” Officer Kobani said, “do you know what’ll happen to the city if you fail to do a sweep, and something blows through the dome?”

Lombrozo’s lips thinned. “Ó Brádaigh, you send me all the information you have, and I’ll consider your request.”

Then he signed off.

“Son of a bitch,” Ó Brádaigh said. He had no idea what to do. He needed that sweep.

“Is he always that big an asshole?” the male officer asked.

“We’re on opposite sides,” Ó Brádaigh said. “He’s an inspector. I’m the one who does the work. He likes the power his position gives him.”

“Can you initiate an emergency surface whatever?” Kobani asked.

“Yeah, but he’s right,” Ó Brádaigh said. “The dome programs will shut off. The entire interior will go dark. The city will know something’s up.”

Kobani shrugged. “I say you just do it.”

“And then what?” Ó Brádaigh asked. “Inspectors need to be monitoring the surface, to see what’s going on. If there’s a hairline fracture or something, I might miss it.”

“We need to get the department on this,” the male officer said to Kobani.

“I wish we could reach the Security Office,” Ó Brádaigh said. He ran a hand over his face. “I’ll do the emergency sweep, but it’d be better if the inspectors ordered it.”

“Who’s his boss?” the male officer asked.

“I don’t know. The city, I guess.” Ó Brádaigh had no idea how all the departments worked.

“Maybe the acting mayor could help,” Kobani said.

“It’s not our decision. We just gotta impress on these people that this is an emergency, and someone else can light a fire under that guy’s ass,” the male officer said.

Ó Brádaigh nodded. He glanced at the control room. He didn’t want to do this on his own.

But, he realized, he had no choice.

FIFTY-SEVEN

FLINT STOOD NEXT
to Issassi and opened another virtual screen. Sometimes it was better to work beside someone and share information rather than work in isolation.

He would rather work beside Talia, whose thought processes he understood almost better than his own, but he didn’t want to bring her into this.

She saw the Security Office as a safe place, and he didn’t want to alter that perception. She was still at Zagrando’s bedside, and it was the best place for her. With luck, this entire crisis would be past before she ever found out about it.

Chaos continued around him—police officers whose names he didn’t know were talking out loud on their links; a few tactical officers were trying to figure out if there was a vulnerability in the building’s barrier; two officials were arguing over who was in charge.

Several people went up to the windows and peered in, just as Nyquist had done. Flint wasn’t sure what the point was behind that. Were they worried that no one was inside?

His stomach jumped at the very idea and he willed the thought away, but not before another followed on its heels. He hoped everyone was still alive in there.

He didn’t want to think about what he would do if DeRicci were gone.

He made himself focus. He had a gift for remembering details of systems he set up, and he had set up so much inside this system that it felt like one of his own.

The changes were as visible to him as they would have been if someone had highlighted them in gold. And as he looked, he had a realization: Whoever had done this hadn’t been a gifted programmer. Whoever had made these changes had learned enough about systems to change them, but not to design them.

“Hey, Kaz,” Flint said softly, “I think only one person did this.”

“If that’s the case, it took ‘em a long time.” The light from the virtual screen illuminated her face. She was frowning in concentration.

Flint nodded once, putting that piece of information in his mind to use later. Whoever did this had to have had access for Issassi’s “long time,” and not a lot of people had that.

There was a pattern to what this person had done. Flint could see the edges of it.

He worked, for how long, he didn’t know. He was losing track of time, like he often did when he was digging into systems. And then he saw it.

The hacker—or alterer—or whatever this person was—had changed things in the same order. If he changed an entry code to one part of the system, he then worked his way through that part of the system as if he were walking from front to back in a room, instead of fixing all of the entry codes at the same time.

“Kaz,” Flint said. “Look.”

He showed her what he had found. She grinned at him, her expression victorious.

“Idiot,” she said—about the hacker, not about Flint. “We don’t reset by item, we reset by date.”

She was right; they had to find the first access date. Flint switched everything on his screen, querying the system, asking it when this user first appeared.